1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method. More particularly, the invention relates to an image processing apparatus that performs geometric transformation on images and an image processing method.
2. Description of Related Art
In the existing image processing technology, geometric transformation on images is often performed with use of geometric transform engine (GTE). The GTE can mostly be applied to lens distortion correction (LDC), rolling shutters of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors, image rotation, and so on.
Due to the significant amount of the image data, when the GTE in the image processing apparatus reads the image data for image processing, the GTE can merely read partial image data each time from the main memory that stores the image data, and the GTE registers the partial image data in a cache for processing. According to the related art, a direct memory access (DMA) that retrieves the partial image data from the main memory can merely support the main memory with invariable capacity, and the DMA can merely access the main memory sequentially, such that a relatively large bandwidth for accessing the main memory is required. When the partial image data are stored into the cache, the memory capacity of the cache and the bandwidth are construed as limitations to image transformation. In light of the foregoing, the conventional image processing apparatus can perform image transformation to a limited extent.